rushfandomcom-20200214-history
Red Sector A
Red Sector A is the third track off of Rush's 1984 album Grace Under Pressure. This is an emoitional track about a first-person account of a Holocaust concentration camp. This is a rare song where Geddy doesn't play any bass guitar. Also it's inspiried by accounts of Geddy's mother who was in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. It was released as a single in 1984 with Red Lenses as the B-side. This is a popular song being released on compliations and live albums through the years. Geddy Lee explained the genesis of the song in an interview: "The seeds for the song were planted nearly 60 years ago in April 1945 when British soldiers liberated the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Lee’s mother, Manya (now Mary) Rubenstein, was among the survivors. (His father, Morris Weinrib, was liberated from the Dachau concentration camp a few weeks later.) "The whole album “Grace Under Pressure,” says Lee, who was born Gary Lee Weinrib, “is about being on the brink and having the courage and strength to survive.” Though “Red Sector A,” like much of the album from which it comes, is set in a bleak, apocalyptic future, what Lee calls “the psychology” of the song comes directly from a story his mother told him about the day she was liberated. “I once asked my mother her first thoughts upon being liberated,” Lee says during a phone conversation. “She didn’t believe liberation was possible. She didn’t believe that if there was a society outside the camp how they could allow this to exist, so she believed society was done in.” In a 1984 interview Neil Peart describes writing Red Sector A: "I read a first person account of someone who had survived the whole system of trains and work camps and Bergen-Belsen and all of that (...) through first person accounts from other people who came out at the end of it, always glad to be alive, which again was the essence of grace, grace under pressure is that through all of it, these people never gave up the strong will to survive, through the utmost horror, and total physical privations of all kinds...I wanted to take a little bit out of being specific and, and just describe the circumstances and try to look at the way people responded to it, and another really important and to me really moving image that I got from a lot of these accounts was that at the end of it, these people of course had been totally isolated from the rest of the world, from their families, from any news at all, and they, in cases that I read, believed that they were the last people surviving." Lyrics: All that we can do is just survive All that we can do to help ourselves Is stay alive... Ragged lines of ragged grey Skeletons, they shuffle away Shouting guards and smoking guns Will cut down the unlucky ones I clutch the wire fence Until my fingers bleed A wound that will not heal- A heart that cannot feel- Hoping that the horror will recede Hoping that tomorrow- We'll all be freed Sickness to insanity Prayer to profanity Days and weeks and months go by Don't feel the hunger-too weak to cry I hear the sound of gunfire At the prison gate Are the liberators here- Do I hope or do I fear? For my father and my brother-it's too late But I must help my mother Stand up straight... Are we the last ones left alive? Are we the only human beings To survive?... Length: 5:11 Personnel: Geddy Lee: keyboards, vocals Alex Lifeson: guitars Neil Peart: drums, electric precussion